JOHN SANBORN

God in 3 Persons

a collaboration between

The Residents and John Sanborn

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The Museum of Modern Art, NY

January 24 + 25, 2020

Legendary performance group the Residents, in collaboration with media artist John Sanborn, have created a singular, live video/theater version of their legendary 1988 album “God in Three Persons”- the story of a disgraced preacher and his twisted obsession with a pair of conjoined twins he claims to be miracle workers.

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Adapted by Sanborn for the stage, G3P features new orchestrations of 10 classic Residents' songs by musical director Joshua Raoul Brody, and we directed for the stage by Travis Chamberlain. Gender queer performer Jiz Lee plays the elusive Twins.

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The work was developed during a 2 week residency at The Lab in San Francisco before premiering at MoMA .

John Sanborn is fascinated by stories. – and the stories of those stories. The ways they inform our understanding of our selves, others, and the world. The ways they can be stifling and prejudicial. And the ways they so often prove to be fanciful illusions in which we have invested too much authority. But Sanborn’s work is not by nature cynical. He doesn’t bemoan this duplicity in the stories we tell. To the contrary, he celebrates the subversion of inherited narratives; and he affirms the deception in stories – albeit with a degree of dark humor – as holding open the possibility of their being told otherwise.

Even as I type these words I know that I will fail to fully describe my ideas.

And that is the point.

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Starting with the premise that empathy is programmatic, Post-Cards from Post-America tempers mixed signals and the imprecision and impracticality of morphology to create a narrative of confusion. Mashing together the ontology of phonological and expressive needs, the work extrudes our current lack of coherence into a comic linguistic puzzle.

The barriers to expression are the first step – but after that what do we have to say? Are we speaking truth to power, or shouting into the wind? Do we even know what truth is – or are we satisfied with making it up as we go along?

Our definition of negative is emptiness or a void—but as with music or design, the inverse verifies the positive. One cannot know joy without pain.

In creating NONSELF, I offer evidence of consciousness, constructed from the negative space that surrounds me. It’s easy to state what IS—but the impression made from what IS NOT speaks to what is “not me” as well as our current understanding of “truth”.

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NONSELF is comprised of a series of 110 short videos each of which uses “not me” attributes, attitudes and perspectives to create an inverted self-portrait.

The initial release is a suite of four works from The Anesthesia Quartet – each is an exclusive digital creation, developed specifically for (s)edition - continuing my explorations of current themes, passions and practice.

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It's delightful to anticipate how a work like this will be received and viewed in the homes of collectors - quite different than how the work will be consumed in a gallery.

Alchemy celebrates the remarkable daring and enormous benefits of Qatar’s development of Liquid Natural Gas as a resource for the world. The work conveys the beauty and majesty of this achievement, in ingenious and poetic form; beginning with a mysterious unknown, continuing through three choreographic stages, and ending with a smile of recognition.